How about a law where if you find something about yourself that doesn't serve a legitimate, warranted law enforcement purpose, the person who recorded that information on you receives a lengthy prison sentence?
Why?
If you are intimidated by law enforcement, that information gives you evidence when you sue them. And if there's a record of you that requires a court order to get, and there's no order, you SHOULD sue them. Otherwise, well, if it doesn't affect your life then what are you worried about?
At worst, it should get someone fired for wasting taxpayer dollars. But if a federal agent gets a hunch that you're a terrorist based on something completely random (that's what a "hunch" is, btw) they should be able to do a cursory investigation, and if we pay for an investigation we should keep that on file, just in case you really are a terrorist.
This is a predictable result of managing tons of users who all want to treat a complex machine that can perform millions of functions as though it were an appliance like a toaster or a microwave
A PC is an appliance, like a toaster of microwave. It is not a magic black box; it is a better typewriter, better calculator, and better sheet of paper. For the majority of PCs out there, the ability to do these three things is far more important than processing speed, number of calculations, or anything else.
I work in front-line IT now; my job is to make my employer's PCs work for their employees. The best part of my job is being able to teach someone how something works; the most important part of my job is getting it to work in the first place, user knolwedge or not be damned.
It's a far-reaching scenario, but the government hasn't done a shred of work to deserve the trust you seem to place in them to "at least have that border they'll never cross"; actually, they've shown quite the opposite.
the United States has detonated exactly two WMDs in anger. This was done so because the projected loss of life from the war it averted was significantly higher than that of the WMD attack. And the gov't took immediate claim for it, just as they've taken immediate claim for any major military action for their entire history.
My government has given us plenty of data to determine its range of potential options. Even the worst excesses of the current administration are not beyond the bounds of what Lincoln, Grant, or Roosevelt did; they're done for far sillier reasons, but still fall within the same range of action.
yes, I'll consider it underfunded as long as I have a life expectancy inferior to two centuries
The elite of the Renaissance spent the wealth of nations funding alchemists who promised to discover the Elixer of Life; throwing money at a problem will not cause a 300% increase in our adult lifespan.
The other big Hamburger restaurant had developed a model where the food was prepared in advance and special orders were a problem.
Virtually every fast food burger joint has this capability, and during peak times they keep a stock of "pre-made" food. Of course, a "peak" is a fairly rare occurance; I don't remember the last time I went to anyplace that wasn't a Thruway Roy Rogers and got a burger from under a heat lamp.
If people didnt jump on whatever the newest Microsoft software is they wouldnt get away with this sort of thing.
What? You mean that there should be some drawn-out process to keep the most-commonly-used XML format from being standardized?
MS's XML should be marked and tagged as standard ASAP -- that way, when Office 2010 rolls around, OpenOffice 3.0 can simply say "we put out docs according to MS's standard. If it doesn't work, it's THEIR fault."
The shock, hostility and downright hatred you will come across will very quickly render claims of death threats highly believable
Walk up to a member of NASA, and say "I think the Moon Landing was just filmed in a studio." You'll get much the same reaction.
Constant global warming, record temperature levels, record carbon levels, and the melting of ice that's older than the Roman Empire are all facts. Those who dismiss facts -- not "explain differently", but outright dismiss -- and pretend to be scientists deserve to be met with extreme levels of rebuttal.
No, they're voting a friggin' name. Pluto is a big round ball of matter that orbits the sun at a mind-boggling distance, and no one's questioning that. NM just wants to call it a "planet", which is well within their prerogative. they could also pass a law whereby you would be referred to as "the one who does not understand the law", and that'd be just fine as well.
One of the basic functions of government is naming things. (Don't believe me? Go look at a street sign. And then pick up any package in the grocery store. The words on those things have meaning, essentially, only because the Government says so.)
Your failure to grasp his words does not invalidate them, it merely illuminates your own poor understanding of the topic.
Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)
You really can't have civil liberties as we commonly understand them without the economic and property rights that make them real. You can't really have the right to free speech for example if you aren't allowed to own a printing press or purchase access to other mass communication media. See the US McCain/Feingold bill for example. So, the poor have no civil liberties?
There was a time, not all that long ago, where simply speaking something in public got you arrested. There are parts of the world today where, if you say something like "Allah isn't God, he's a myth" or "Muhammad masterbated", you can be executed.
You don't know what civil liberties are if you think you need a printing press or a 50,000 watt transmitter to exercise them.
When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous????
Yes. And there are two facts you're essentially ignoring.
1: The "religions" that believe in a dedicated god of wine, or the furies, or Thor and Zeus, all died out long ago. So long, in fact, that that the best record we have of them is the written account of Christian Missionaries and Scholars who had little cause to seriously study them. (The Greeks and Romans are slightly better than the rest, but our best grasp of their pre-Christian religion is colored by what might be intentional myths.)
2: Most of the extant modern religions have a basic theology that is essentially compatible. Where they differ are on a relatively small number of specifics -- is the Almighty humanlike, or divine and unknowing? Are we supposed to live in this world, or try and escape it, or suffer here until we prove ourself? Is sex a good idea or a really good idea? (The former Pope and the Dali Lama -- two of the most different religions we have -- were known to meet and find as much they agreed on as they disagreed on.)
No one at all should be surprised to find similarites between religions. If there is truth in religion, there is one single objective truth, not half a dozen different mini-truths. If religion is just a myth, then it's a myth likely shared by those who believed it to be true, and even with telephone-style mutations it should still be similar after only a few thousand years.
I don't think that anybody's religion is absurd; I think that absurdities are introduced into religion by those who wish to pervert religion for their own ends.
Anyone who's ever listened to thirty minutes of right-wing "news" knows that there's no point.
It's not that the left/middle/smart can't debate. It's that they actually CAN, and they have the winning argument, so the right just tries to change the rules.
You as in someone else other then me? No, you as the guy who said I can't even call ahead and have them place something on a shelf for me and send someone else after it without problems.
You see something you like in the flyer, go to Bestbuy.com and place your order there. They will go, make sure they have it, and then move it to their customer service area for you to pick up. The situation you described is patently false.
(interlude: Sears started with a mail-order catalog in 1886. They predate toilet paper and commercial electricity. Not only is it older than I am, it's older than my 80-year old grandmother -- and likely predates her mother, and possbibly HER grandmother!)
A simple few of them is unqualified sales staff who tell you lies to make a sale. Welcome to the world of retail. Everyone who knows enough to be a good salesperson leaves as soon as they can, to get a real job somewhere that doesn't treat them like crap. If you think that Target, Wal-Mart, your small local mom & pop shop, Circuit City, or CompUSA are any better, well, then you obviously haven't worked there.
Aside from having a website that's actually connected to their stores AT ALL, Best Buy is exactly like every other store out there.
Isn't radar just radio waves? which in turn are just low frequency light? If this new material retains these properties at radio wavelengths then it would work, no?
No. This material is non-reflexive, not light-absorbing.
Radar works by shining the equivalent of a bright light out in space, and watching for anything that shines back. Stealth works by not shining. A block of this material would also not shine, but the components that let the plane fly would shine rather brightly.
1: Practical. similar to, but completely different from, particle.
2: You can go to Bestbuy.com and get in-store pickup on most items, but they expect you to actually come and get it yourself. You seem to be complaining that you have to actually show up yourself. Oh, poor you.
3: Best Buy, and all other brick & mortar stores, exist because they offer value-add (instant delivery, ability to actually pick up and use hardware, practical returns) that surpasses the savings for a good portion of what they sell. I for one would not buy a dishwasher, for example, without actually being able to see the darn thing in reality myself. (And going to Best Buy and then buying it elsewhere is just a good way to make sure that you'll never be able to do that again.)
Re:Not this kind of cook book?
on
MySQL Cookbook
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· Score: 1
No, no, his problem is that all he's got is refried beans. He wants to know what he can do with them, and nothing else.
he's suggesting that [Al Gore et al] might just be tooting a horn that would be better left alone, at least until it's better understood! You're right. We shouldn't mess with the planet until we know what the mess will do.
Since Gore's argument is just to reduce what we're doing now, the "we don't know enough" argument supports him, not detracts from him.
I'm amazed the article doesn't mention military applications. What do they use on stealth planes now? They use a radar absorbing material, and a shape designed to refract radar mostly up and away from the ground.
this material would do bupkus for Stealth. Radar would pass through, bounce off whatever else they make the plane out of, and then bounce right back to the receiver.
It's a pretty big achievement, I think, to get WinXP to run on such a crappy setup, even more so because it IS Windows, which we're used to seeing require much more in terms of resources than a comparable Linux package.
No, it's not. All they did was plug in old hardware and try to install it. No limitation of size, no optimization of anything. Just simple testing of "how slow can you go?"
The Linux comparison would be picking up Linux at the store, and seeing how low a system you could put it on.
(The MS comparison to small-size Linux hacks is a size-limited Windows Embedded system.)
Well you're making a very narrow definition of free...
Free (adj): Having a legal respect for and protection of personal liberties.
I don't know what other definition you could be talking about; America has had a pretty constant definition of "free", and while we're not the only English-speaking country, we got our definition from the British Empire, which is where the rest of the English-peaking world got theirs, too.
I already named Venezuela as moving in the right direction, based on 1 definition of 'free'.
No, you didn't. Slashdot is not a mailing list; if you want to argue by reference, include a link.
The UK... defend[ed] the rights of its citizens... captured by the US.
(First rule of international law: there is no such thing as international law.)
The UK exeriting political defense of its citizens is just being a good government. Good governments and free nations are strongly correlated, but proving one does not prove the other.
Australia is more 'free', because people can get access to high quality medical care
By no stretch of our language does "free" mean "cared for." Public health care is a great idea that is good for the people and for the country as a whole, but it is not a freedom. Freedom is the ability to light up a cigarette, not the doctor taking it away from you.
Every mainstream media outlet backed the illegal invasion of Iraq. When the WOMD claims were found out to be false, every mainstream media outlet conveniently found something else to cover, resulting in the sad situation where 30% of Americans still believe to this day that Iraq had WOMD!
1: It wasn't illegal. (See above.) The UN never passed a resolution forbidding or condemning the invasion, and the first Iraq war ended with a peace treaty, which Saddam repeatedly violated. The invasion was one of choice, was sold on a lie, and is a distraction from the War on Terror as well as a generally bad idea -- but it's perfectly legal.
2: Iraq had WMDs. He used them on the Iranians and the Kurds. By the best accounts I've heard, Saddam thought that Iraq had WMDs.
3: Show me a poll, and let's check for bias. There's no regulation of polling in the United States, so "push polls" are common. Don't trust any number you hear where you don't see the question asked.
You show me a people who don't have access to [unbiased] reporting, and I'll show you a people who aren't free.
Every reporter in the world has bias. It's human nature. The important parts are a Choice of Reporter, and an Aknowlodgement of Bias. The worst reporters in the US are those who claim to be unbiased; the best are those who admit their own biases, especially when those biases may conflict with their reporting.
(And if you think embedded journalism turns the press into propaganda machines for public policy, you haven't actually watched US TV. The only thing putting reporters together with soldiers does is keep the reporter from bashing the soldier for the government's faults.)
These things were won outside of the official 'democratic' system, and in spite of it. You're talking about sustained grass-roots campaigns that threatened to overthrow the official system, so they had to make concessions.
What exactly do you think Democracy is for? It's to let the people change their government without killing anybody. The Civil Rights movement succceeded when they changed enough citizen's minds to make "I will support civil rights" an election-winning proposition, and the Civil Rights act was passed. (What didn't come from the CRA came from the courts, which only heard the cases at all because of the Freedom of any American to petition for the redress of grievances.)
Prohibition was enacted in the 18th Amendment, after a century-long crusade of demonstration,
Some software is overpriced at $5. If yours isn't, you might want to consider raising the price on your next version -- perhaps by bundling it with something worthwhile. Without knowing what exactly your software is, well, all I can do is point out that the consumer (rightly) reads a manufacturer's price as a statement of value, and will not value a good higher than its maker values it.
$5 is less than many Americans spend on lunch. Pricing your software for $5 says "this is something i whipped up over lunch."
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How about a law where if you find something about yourself that doesn't serve a legitimate, warranted law enforcement purpose, the person who recorded that information on you receives a lengthy prison sentence?
Why?
If you are intimidated by law enforcement, that information gives you evidence when you sue them. And if there's a record of you that requires a court order to get, and there's no order, you SHOULD sue them. Otherwise, well, if it doesn't affect your life then what are you worried about?
At worst, it should get someone fired for wasting taxpayer dollars. But if a federal agent gets a hunch that you're a terrorist based on something completely random (that's what a "hunch" is, btw) they should be able to do a cursory investigation, and if we pay for an investigation we should keep that on file, just in case you really are a terrorist.
This is a predictable result of managing tons of users who all want to treat a complex machine that can perform millions of functions as though it were an appliance like a toaster or a microwave
A PC is an appliance, like a toaster of microwave. It is not a magic black box; it is a better typewriter, better calculator, and better sheet of paper. For the majority of PCs out there, the ability to do these three things is far more important than processing speed, number of calculations, or anything else.
I work in front-line IT now; my job is to make my employer's PCs work for their employees. The best part of my job is being able to teach someone how something works; the most important part of my job is getting it to work in the first place, user knolwedge or not be damned.
It's a far-reaching scenario, but the government hasn't done a shred of work to deserve the trust you seem to place in them to "at least have that border they'll never cross"; actually, they've shown quite the opposite.
the United States has detonated exactly two WMDs in anger. This was done so because the projected loss of life from the war it averted was significantly higher than that of the WMD attack. And the gov't took immediate claim for it, just as they've taken immediate claim for any major military action for their entire history.
My government has given us plenty of data to determine its range of potential options. Even the worst excesses of the current administration are not beyond the bounds of what Lincoln, Grant, or Roosevelt did; they're done for far sillier reasons, but still fall within the same range of action.
yes, I'll consider it underfunded as long as I have a life expectancy inferior to two centuries
The elite of the Renaissance spent the wealth of nations funding alchemists who promised to discover the Elixer of Life; throwing money at a problem will not cause a 300% increase in our adult lifespan.
The other big Hamburger restaurant had developed a model where the food was prepared in advance and special orders were a problem.
Virtually every fast food burger joint has this capability, and during peak times they keep a stock of "pre-made" food. Of course, a "peak" is a fairly rare occurance; I don't remember the last time I went to anyplace that wasn't a Thruway Roy Rogers and got a burger from under a heat lamp.
Yes, his post did suggest that, but the Bible suggests that it has already been proven.
No. The bible suggests that the Universe was intentionally created, and that the Creator chose to reveal himself to us. No proof beyond "I say so."
If people didnt jump on whatever the newest Microsoft software is they wouldnt get away with this sort of thing.
What? You mean that there should be some drawn-out process to keep the most-commonly-used XML format from being standardized?
MS's XML should be marked and tagged as standard ASAP -- that way, when Office 2010 rolls around, OpenOffice 3.0 can simply say "we put out docs according to MS's standard. If it doesn't work, it's THEIR fault."
The shock, hostility and downright hatred you will come across will very quickly render claims of death threats highly believable
Walk up to a member of NASA, and say "I think the Moon Landing was just filmed in a studio." You'll get much the same reaction.
Constant global warming, record temperature levels, record carbon levels, and the melting of ice that's older than the Roman Empire are all facts. Those who dismiss facts -- not "explain differently", but outright dismiss -- and pretend to be scientists deserve to be met with extreme levels of rebuttal.
(apart from MS software, but lets be honest, if you're running a free NT clone, you aren't going to be running MS office are you?)
Yes, actually.
They're voting a friggin' fact!!
No, they're voting a friggin' name. Pluto is a big round ball of matter that orbits the sun at a mind-boggling distance, and no one's questioning that. NM just wants to call it a "planet", which is well within their prerogative. they could also pass a law whereby you would be referred to as "the one who does not understand the law", and that'd be just fine as well.
One of the basic functions of government is naming things. (Don't believe me? Go look at a street sign. And then pick up any package in the grocery store. The words on those things have meaning, essentially, only because the Government says so.)
Wrong.
No, that's what he said.
Your failure to grasp his words does not invalidate them, it merely illuminates your own poor understanding of the topic.
Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)
Is it just me or are these laws incredibly dependent on one point? What is acceptable harm? If a beer spills in the woods does anyone scream?
The three laws were a creation of Assimov to highlight the alleged impossibility of a system of universal laws to control robots.
A real attempt at universal robot-laws would need to include a rule 0: "No machine may perform a task beyond its design parameters."
There was a time, not all that long ago, where simply speaking something in public got you arrested. There are parts of the world today where, if you say something like "Allah isn't God, he's a myth" or "Muhammad masterbated", you can be executed.
You don't know what civil liberties are if you think you need a printing press or a 50,000 watt transmitter to exercise them.
When you look to other religions and say "that's ridiculous" at the idea of a wine god or a god with the head of an elephant or spirits and ferries or Zeus or Thor wielding his hammer, have you ever considered one thing.... is your religion any less ridiculous????
Yes. And there are two facts you're essentially ignoring.
1: The "religions" that believe in a dedicated god of wine, or the furies, or Thor and Zeus, all died out long ago. So long, in fact, that that the best record we have of them is the written account of Christian Missionaries and Scholars who had little cause to seriously study them. (The Greeks and Romans are slightly better than the rest, but our best grasp of their pre-Christian religion is colored by what might be intentional myths.)
2: Most of the extant modern religions have a basic theology that is essentially compatible. Where they differ are on a relatively small number of specifics -- is the Almighty humanlike, or divine and unknowing? Are we supposed to live in this world, or try and escape it, or suffer here until we prove ourself? Is sex a good idea or a really good idea? (The former Pope and the Dali Lama -- two of the most different religions we have -- were known to meet and find as much they agreed on as they disagreed on.)
No one at all should be surprised to find similarites between religions. If there is truth in religion, there is one single objective truth, not half a dozen different mini-truths. If religion is just a myth, then it's a myth likely shared by those who believed it to be true, and even with telephone-style mutations it should still be similar after only a few thousand years.
I don't think that anybody's religion is absurd; I think that absurdities are introduced into religion by those who wish to pervert religion for their own ends.
These guys can't debate...
Anyone who's ever listened to thirty minutes of right-wing "news" knows that there's no point.
It's not that the left/middle/smart can't debate. It's that they actually CAN, and they have the winning argument, so the right just tries to change the rules.
You see something you like in the flyer, go to Bestbuy.com and place your order there. They will go, make sure they have it, and then move it to their customer service area for you to pick up. The situation you described is patently false.
(interlude: Sears started with a mail-order catalog in 1886. They predate toilet paper and commercial electricity. Not only is it older than I am, it's older than my 80-year old grandmother -- and likely predates her mother, and possbibly HER grandmother!) A simple few of them is unqualified sales staff who tell you lies to make a sale. Welcome to the world of retail. Everyone who knows enough to be a good salesperson leaves as soon as they can, to get a real job somewhere that doesn't treat them like crap. If you think that Target, Wal-Mart, your small local mom & pop shop, Circuit City, or CompUSA are any better, well, then you obviously haven't worked there.
Aside from having a website that's actually connected to their stores AT ALL, Best Buy is exactly like every other store out there.
Isn't radar just radio waves? which in turn are just low frequency light? If this new material retains these properties at radio wavelengths then it would work, no?
No. This material is non-reflexive, not light-absorbing.
Radar works by shining the equivalent of a bright light out in space, and watching for anything that shines back. Stealth works by not shining. A block of this material would also not shine, but the components that let the plane fly would shine rather brightly.
Why exactly do you define avoiding taxes as "evil"?
Because the taxes that cash-rich google doesn't pay are paid for by the rest of us.
1: Practical. similar to, but completely different from, particle.
2: You can go to Bestbuy.com and get in-store pickup on most items, but they expect you to actually come and get it yourself. You seem to be complaining that you have to actually show up yourself. Oh, poor you.
3: Best Buy, and all other brick & mortar stores, exist because they offer value-add (instant delivery, ability to actually pick up and use hardware, practical returns) that surpasses the savings for a good portion of what they sell. I for one would not buy a dishwasher, for example, without actually being able to see the darn thing in reality myself. (And going to Best Buy and then buying it elsewhere is just a good way to make sure that you'll never be able to do that again.)
No, no, his problem is that all he's got is refried beans. He wants to know what he can do with them, and nothing else.
Since Gore's argument is just to reduce what we're doing now, the "we don't know enough" argument supports him, not detracts from him.
this material would do bupkus for Stealth. Radar would pass through, bounce off whatever else they make the plane out of, and then bounce right back to the receiver.
It's a pretty big achievement, I think, to get WinXP to run on such a crappy setup, even more so because it IS Windows, which we're used to seeing require much more in terms of resources than a comparable Linux package.
No, it's not. All they did was plug in old hardware and try to install it. No limitation of size, no optimization of anything. Just simple testing of "how slow can you go?"
The Linux comparison would be picking up Linux at the store, and seeing how low a system you could put it on.
(The MS comparison to small-size Linux hacks is a size-limited Windows Embedded system.)
Well you're making a very narrow definition of free...
... defend[ed] the rights of its citizens ... captured by the US.
Free (adj): Having a legal respect for and protection of personal liberties.
I don't know what other definition you could be talking about; America has had a pretty constant definition of "free", and while we're not the only English-speaking country, we got our definition from the British Empire, which is where the rest of the English-peaking world got theirs, too.
I already named Venezuela as moving in the right direction, based on 1 definition of 'free'.
No, you didn't. Slashdot is not a mailing list; if you want to argue by reference, include a link.
The UK
(First rule of international law: there is no such thing as international law.)
The UK exeriting political defense of its citizens is just being a good government. Good governments and free nations are strongly correlated, but proving one does not prove the other.
Australia is more 'free', because people can get access to high quality medical care
By no stretch of our language does "free" mean "cared for." Public health care is a great idea that is good for the people and for the country as a whole, but it is not a freedom. Freedom is the ability to light up a cigarette, not the doctor taking it away from you.
Every mainstream media outlet backed the illegal invasion of Iraq. When the WOMD claims were found out to be false, every mainstream media outlet conveniently found something else to cover, resulting in the sad situation where 30% of Americans still believe to this day that Iraq had WOMD!
1: It wasn't illegal. (See above.) The UN never passed a resolution forbidding or condemning the invasion, and the first Iraq war ended with a peace treaty, which Saddam repeatedly violated. The invasion was one of choice, was sold on a lie, and is a distraction from the War on Terror as well as a generally bad idea -- but it's perfectly legal.
2: Iraq had WMDs. He used them on the Iranians and the Kurds. By the best accounts I've heard, Saddam thought that Iraq had WMDs.
3: Show me a poll, and let's check for bias. There's no regulation of polling in the United States, so "push polls" are common. Don't trust any number you hear where you don't see the question asked.
You show me a people who don't have access to [unbiased] reporting, and I'll show you a people who aren't free.
Every reporter in the world has bias. It's human nature. The important parts are a Choice of Reporter, and an Aknowlodgement of Bias. The worst reporters in the US are those who claim to be unbiased; the best are those who admit their own biases, especially when those biases may conflict with their reporting.
(And if you think embedded journalism turns the press into propaganda machines for public policy, you haven't actually watched US TV. The only thing putting reporters together with soldiers does is keep the reporter from bashing the soldier for the government's faults.)
These things were won outside of the official 'democratic' system, and in spite of it. You're talking about sustained grass-roots campaigns that threatened to overthrow the official system, so they had to make concessions.
What exactly do you think Democracy is for? It's to let the people change their government without killing anybody. The Civil Rights movement succceeded when they changed enough citizen's minds to make "I will support civil rights" an election-winning proposition, and the Civil Rights act was passed. (What didn't come from the CRA came from the courts, which only heard the cases at all because of the Freedom of any American to petition for the redress of grievances.)
Prohibition was enacted in the 18th Amendment, after a century-long crusade of demonstration,
I sell software for $5...
Some software is overpriced at $5. If yours isn't, you might want to consider raising the price on your next version -- perhaps by bundling it with something worthwhile. Without knowing what exactly your software is, well, all I can do is point out that the consumer (rightly) reads a manufacturer's price as a statement of value, and will not value a good higher than its maker values it.
$5 is less than many Americans spend on lunch. Pricing your software for $5 says "this is something i whipped up over lunch."